Conflicts with adversaries can sometimes be unavoidable. Decision making in conflict can be unpleasant, stressful, and troubling. Success in an adversarial situation will not necessarily be achieved by the participant with the better initial position, but rather by the decision maker who is experienced in conflict situations, understands the dynamics of conflict, and is able to outsmart their adversary. This chapter differentiates between interests, disputes, and conflicts. Methods for conflict resolution are outlined as well as strategies for prevailing in a conflict. The chapter summarizes institutions in society where some disputes or conflicts may be addressed. Important structural similarities found in many disputes and conflicts are highlighted, including the different approaches of offense and defense, and the impact of timing and movement. Whether the parties to the conflict are individuals, corporations, or nations confronting each other at a negotiating table, a courtroom, or in a military battlespace, many of the strategies, dynamics, and interactions are the same.

During the closing years of the twentieth century, research psychologists and economists came to recognize the synergies and overlaps between the two disciplines. The field of behavioral economics provides descriptive explanations of why people behave as they do, and also tools and techniques that are now widely adopted for influencing the decisions individuals make. In their 2009 book Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein proposed libertarian paternalism, whereby institutions could gently guide people in their decision making. They introduced the concept of choice architecture whereby the decisions people face could be designed and structured so individuals retained control but can easily make decisions that benefit themselves and society. Examples include selection of healthful foods, encouraging organ donation, early planning for retirement savings, and others.

Game theory is not what most people think of when we hear the word “game”. Game theory provides conceptual models and logical explanations to describe and predict the decisions rational agents make and the strategies they choose when they interact with other rational agents.

Decisions are often made in an interactive environment where the strategies people adopt, the decisions they make, and the actions they take, are all based on – or are in a reaction to – the decisions of others. This can be true in business, politics, interpersonal relations, and competitive environments. This chapter on game theory includes the most commonly used example in game theory, the prisoner’s dilemma, as well as Nash equilibrium which explains why two or more people in games may often settle on outcomes that are mutually non-optimal. Different types and structures of common real-world games are discussed, including zero-sum games, cooperative and non-cooperative games, tit-for-tat strategy, and social choice theory.

Stressful decisions are often unavoidable. We all face them eventually. There are situations where we are required to make a decision where life, limb, or fortunes may be at stake, we don’t have all the facts we need, and we have little time. This chapter examines both descriptive and prescriptive models for making decisions when the situation is urgent. The roles that experience and expertise play in making high-speed and high-stakes decisions are outlined. The chapter includes a review of the literature on decision making under stress and four features that are often present during decision making under stress: information overload, time pressure, complexity, and uncertainty. The recognition-primed decision (RPD) model proposed by Gary Klein (2017) is discussed, as well as the OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act) model developed by Colonel John Boyd (1986).

Although people have been making decisions for many thousands of years, it was only since John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern wrote Theory of Games and Economic Behavior and Herb Simon wrote of satisficing and bounded rationality, that researchers started to analyze and understand how people make decisions. The mid- and late twentieth century saw an expansion in what is known about the making of decisions, but more recently new areas within decision theory have come under scientific study. This final chapter is forward-looking and considers possible future directions for understanding human decision making and also for the development of decision theory. Among these future directions are emotion, culture, artificial intelligence, and intuition itself.

We often make decisions that are based on multiple attributes that cannot be measured on objective scales. Life often includes tradeoffs. Which job should you take? Which apartment should you rent? Whom should you marry? Life is filled with options and decisions that include many different factors – happiness, money, comfort, health, future opportunities, time demands, etc. How can people make decisions that require the comparison and weighing of these and other attributes? Previous chapters covering probability, decisions trees, and decision strategies, discussed prescriptive models used to determine optimal solutions when decisions were made based on a single attribute. This chapter outlines the concept and structure of multi-attribute decisions. In some cases, multi-attribute decisions can include compensatory strategies, where tradeoffs can be considered, but in other cases, only noncompensatory strategies are possible. Norm referencing and criterion referencing are discussed. Charles Darwin’s decision to marry or not will be one example of a multi-attribute utility decision.

Overcoming a feeling of indecisiveness is not just a question of understanding the mathematical models, strategies, and psychological aspects of decision-making. Indecision can be a valid and reasonable reaction to a specific situation or a particular question being asked. However, an ongoing feeling of indecisiveness may be rooted in the personality and self-perception of the individual. The feeling of indecisiveness may sometimes not be just a desire to make the best decision, but also a fear of making the wrong decision and the fear of being criticized by others for having made the wrong decision. This chapter will address the circumstances where indecision can be a very reasonable response to case-specific situations. But it will also examine the psychological underpinnings of a broader sense of indecisiveness, how fear can sometimes cause either indecisiveness or emotionally based and unexamined hasty decisions, as well as strategies for overcoming indecisiveness.

There are common situations where what seemed at first like the best decision may result in a suboptimal outcome, squandered opportunities, or poor allocation of resources. These situations are referred to as decision traps. In some cases, people may create their own traps by imposing unnecessary limits or constraints on their choices. One self-created trap is known as failing to “think outside the box”. The trap of functional fixedness can lead people to miss solutions that are in front of them. The over-reliance on heuristics can introduce self-created traps. Other traps include the status-quo trap, the endowment effect, confirmation bias, the sunk-cost trap, the escalation-of-commitment trap, time-delay traps, and collective traps including the Tragedy of the Commons. These and other common decision traps are discussed, along with ways to identify them in advance and measures that can be taken to avoid them.

Summary

There are significant savings to be made if employee investigations can be avoided or conducted in a more appropriate manner.

This chapter discusses both the financial costs of investigations – the staff and legal costs of running them and the consequential sickness absence costs – as well as the wider economic and opportunity costs.

The financial and economic costs of avoidable investigations are examples of waste. Others, such as the loss of human potential, are also discussed.

Introduction

Employee investigations are a necessary and important part of organizational governance. But they are also an area of human resources management that can run up significant financial and economic costs.

In relation to finance, the requirement to backfill substantial periods of sickness, the internal administration of the investigation process, often involving senior staff, and the related legal support can quickly cause costs to rise.

The economic impact, which is often far greater, arises from organizations investing time and resources into investigations, acting as a distraction to the delivery of their priorities, often to the detriment of organizational outcomes.

Financial costs The financial cost of investigations relates to the use of resources directly incurred because of them. These include the time of staff involved in processing and administering investigations, any legal charges and other expenditure incurred during the process.

The most ambitious attempt to calculate these financial savings comes from a study of the savings from improved approaches to workplace conflict (Saundry and Unwin, 2021) on behalf of the UK's Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (Acas).